Indonesia is, of course, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country (there are 207 million people, 95% of them Muslim). As such, it’s also the country having the most cases of female genital mutilation (FGM). A new Unicef report on that practice, as reported in the New York Times, gives some surprising news, some bad news, and some good news.
The surprising news, at least for many of us, is that even in Indonesia, often touted as a “moderate” Muslim country (I’m looking at you Reza Aslan), FGM is common; in fact, it accounts for almost a third of the world’s cases:
There has long been anecdotal evidence of the practice there, but the United Nations Children’s Fund estimated Thursday that 60 million women and girls there have been cut based on national survey data collected by the Indonesian government. The addition of Indonesia is largely responsible for raising the global tally of women and girls who have undergone the practice to 200 million from 130 million, and the number of countries where it is concentrated to 30 from 29.
We knew the practice existed but we didn’t have a sense of the scope,” said Claudia Cappa, a statistics specialist for Unicef, which released the report. She said the new data from Indonesia showed that cutting was not just “an African problem.”
Well, we already knew that, as FGM is widespread in the Middle East as well, concentrated in Muslim societies. It’s not just “an African problem” divorced from religion, nor just a “cultural problem”, as maintained by charlatans like Aslan. As Heather Hastie has shown on her website, FGM, while not totally limited to Muslims, is largely a Muslim issue, since many schools of Islam either endorse it, recommend it, or deem it obligatory. And its prevalence in Indonesia is, as the Times notes, explained by Islam:
The data from Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, provides a snapshot of the prevalence of genital cutting in a country where secular and religious attitudes toward the practice are increasingly in conflict. Indonesian authorities tried to ban cutting 10 years ago, but religious authorities who consider it important for girls to undergo the ritual before marriage objected. In response, the government softened its stance, issuing regulations that directed cutting should be done only by medical professionals in a noninvasive way that does not injure girls and women.
. . .The practice is “regarded as part of our culture, or a confirmation that they will be officially ‘Islamized,’ ” Jurnalis Uddin, the chairman of the Center for Population and Gender Studies at Yarsi University in Jakarta, said in an email, adding that the practice “in Indonesia is mostly symbolic (no cutting at all).”
. . . Rena Herdiyani, vice chairwoman of Kalyanamitra, an Indonesian nongovernmental organization that lobbies the national government to ban all forms of cutting, wants the government to impose sanctions on people who perform circumcisions.
“They think it’s a family or cultural tradition, and an Islamic obligation, yet they can’t name any verses in the Quran about female circumcision,” she said.
The only good news is this: instead of the barbaric mutilations involving excision of the labia or entire clitoris, the practice in Indonesia often involves, as noted above, non-invasive surgery, sometimes removing only a sliver of the clitoris. But it’s still unnecessary, and the Indonesian government is still bowing to Muslim dicta that mandate this surgery:
Conflicting views have influenced public policy toward cutting. In 2006, the Ministry of Health issued a document banning female circumcision by medical professionals. In response, in 2008, Indonesia’s top Muslim clerical body issued a nonbinding fatwa or edict saying female circumcision should be performed if requested, as long as the method was not physically or psychologically dangerous.
In 2010, the Ministry of Health, at the urging of the clerical body, issued a regulation saying female circumcision should be performed only by licensed doctors, midwives or nurses using safety and cleanliness procedures detailed by the ministry. But anti-cutting activists objected to the regulation, and in 2014 it was repealed. Unicef officials assert in their report that the repeal does not go far enough because it does not explicitly prohibit cutting or set penalties for those who perform the procedure.
This is one issue that should unite feminists of all stripes with anti-theists. Here we have a government refusing to ban a totally unnecessary and dangerous surgery on women, and that refusal comes solely from pressure by Islamic “authorities.” Sixty million women in Indonesia have undergone FGM—almost a third of all the nation’s women—and it’s time to stop it. But that won’t occur until the government either grows a backbone, Islam disappears from the world, or the various schools of Islam explicitly forbid the practice.
